David Lodge, British Novelist Who Satirized Academic Life, Dies at 89

David Lodge, the erudite author of academic comedy and a wide-ranging literary critic, died on Wednesday in Birmingham, England. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by his literary agent, Jonny Geller.

The author of 15 novels and more than a dozen nonfiction books as well as plays and screenplays, Mr. Lodge was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his work has been translated into dozens of languages. His best-known work, “Campus Trilogy,” dramatized the brief heyday of English literature as a discipline and the jet-setting lifestyle of its professoriate.

Mr. Lodge’s university novels took place not in the rarefied world of Oxford, Cambridge and the Ivy League but at middle-class schools, like the fictional Rummidge, a “grimy, provincial” place full of thwarted ambition and backbiting. Ingeniously plotted, his fiction teems with unlikely romance and strange coincidence.

The first of these novels, “Changing Places” (1975), became famous for a game the character Philip Swallow invents called “Humiliation,” in which players try to name the most well-regarded book they haven’t read. In his first attempt, Howard Ringbaum, a pretentious English professor, keeps missing the point by listing obscure titles in attempts to impress his colleagues. Finally, desperately, he admits to never having read “Hamlet.” He wins the game but loses his job.

In the trilogy’s second book, “Small World” (1984), Morris Zapp, a slick theoretician delivering a lecture at a conference, uses the striptease style supposedly popular in the all-nude go-go bars of Berkeley, Calif., as a metaphor for what continental theory has uncovered about language:

“This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease, it is the terpsichorean equivalent of the hermeneutic fallacy of a recuperable meaning, which claims that if we remove the clothing of its rhetoric from a literary text we discover the bare facts it is trying to communicate.”

It’s the beginning of a long and hilariously comic monologue on poststructuralist theory, all the more effective because, like the above, it is actually parsable. It is also obscene, so much so that in the course of its delivery “a young man in the audience fainted and was carried out.”

The character of Zapp was inspired by the American literary theorist Stanley Fish, who enjoyed the homage so much that he replaced the name on his own office door at Duke University with Zapp’s. (The third novel in the trilogy is “Nice Work,” published in 1988.)